Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Preface

This anthology, based on the initial conference of a new academic project I
founded and chair at Brandeis University called the Project on Gender, Culture,
Religion, and the Law, is part of a new book series that I co-edit with
Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, the project director.
My reason for founding the Project on Gender, Culture, Religion, and
the Law can be simply put: the status of women is the cause of our time. The
mission of the project is more complicated—we seek to identify ways to work...

Open the newspaper or surf the net any day and you will find a range of stories,
both domestic and international, involving conflicts between women’s rights
and religious or cultural traditions. Many of these raise challenging questions
about the scope of freedom of religion and the role of the state in balancing
the rights of individuals, religious authorities, and the broader community. A
representative sample might include stories like these...

Part I: The Ethics of Recognizing Religious Family Law in Secular Societies

The “paradox of liberalism,” often phrased as the problem of how to “tolerate
the intolerant,”1 is not only a problem of theorists but a practical problem for
those who are committed both to gender equality and to religious freedom.
To pursue gender equality is to encounter the frequent objections that challenged
practices rest on religious grounds; to defend religious freedom is to
confront objections that a religious school’s decision to fire a pregnant teacher...

2 | Privatizing Diversity: A Cautionary Tale from Religious Arbitration in Family Law

Demands to accommodate religious diversity in the public sphere have recently
intensified. The debates surrounding the Islamic headscarf (hijab) in
Europe vividly illustrate this trend. We also find a new challenge on the horizon:
namely, the request to “privatize diversity” through alternative dispute
resolution processes that permit parties to move their disputes from public
courthouses into the domain of religious or customary sources of law and...

3 | Marriage Pluralism, Family Law Jurisdiction, and Sex Equality in the United States

Gender justice remains unfinished business. How is family law, in particular the
relationship between civil and religious family law, relevant to the challenge of
securing gender justice both in the United States and around the globe? This
question has received comparatively little attention when measured against
the by-now
voluminous literature on whether multiculturalism and feminism
(and sex equality) are in conflict, as well as on how constitutional democracies...

Part Two: Exploring the Intersections of Civil and Religious Laws

4 | From Religious “Right” to Civil “Wrong”: Using Israeli Tort Law to Unravel the Knots of Gender, Equality, and Jewish Divorce

The purpose of this paper is to describe how Israeli cause lawyers2 are using
tort law to untie the knots between gender, equality, and Jewish divorce law.
To that end, I will give a brief overview of Israel’s family law regime and its
gender quagmire, explain how the tort of “get-refusal”
is being constructed in
response, present some preliminary statistics from the trenches, and outline
some of the practical and theoretical implications of these new tort cases. ...

5 | Flirting with God in Western Secular Courts: Mahr in the West

If liberalism is committed to the individual and individual choice, it is also
conventionally taken to be committed to freedom and equality. Giving effects
to such principles often creates tensions: the “free” acts of individuals
will sometimes produce inequality, and state enforcement of equality will
likely reduce individual freedom. Moreover, when faced with the claims of
subordinated groups, liberalism is asked to make concessions in which these...

6 | Muslim Family Law in South Africa: Conflating the Right to Religion with the Privileging of Religion?

It is commonly accepted that the arena of family law is a tension-filled
one;
that the equality and nondiscrimination rights of women are violated through
laws, policies, and practices; that despite both international and domestic
obligations in regard to equality and nondiscrimination, impunity in this
regard is the norm rather than the exception. The focus of this chapter will
be limited to briefly highlighting issues around sex and gender equality and...

7 | Recognition of Polygamous Marriages in the New South Africa

In Setswana, the word for “polygyny” is lefufa. It also means “jealousy.”
Mogadikane, the word for “co-wife”
is derived from the verb meaning “to
rival, annoy, or cause a pain in the stomach.”2 Women complain that polygyny
breeds insecurity, hostility, and witchcraft among those who find themselves
in competition for their shared husband’s scarce economic and emotional resources.3 Polygyny brings with it both the humiliation of being supplanted in...

Part Three: Narratives of Innovative Law Reform

For the last few years I have been researching a small, yet growing number of
Modern Orthodox women in Israel who seek to challenge, resist, or adapt
the Orthodox wedding ritual to transform it into an expression of their own
identity, values, and ideals. These women identified themselves both as Orthodox
and as feminists or having feminist consciousness, at least to some degree.
These two identities are often at odds, since values embraced by feminism...

9 | The Yoetzet Halakhah: Avoiding Conflict While Instituting Change

Modern Orthodoxy,1 like most other religious communities, has been affected
by the feminist movement in modern times. As in the secular community,
Modern Orthodox women are now more learned and more active in the community.2 Stages in a woman’s life are now openly celebrated in the Modern
Orthodox community, and there is a growing demand by women to be more
active in spiritual ceremonies, especially those involving prayer.3 ...

My paper is based on the realization I have made as a feminist activist in a
country where 94 percent of the people are officially Muslims1 that it is possible
to improve people’s understanding of each others’ rights and responsibilities
without embarking into a discourse challenging mainstream religious norms.
In Senegal (as is the case in sub-Saharan
Africa in general) the majority of
people continue to believe in the taboos and prohibitions set up by their...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.